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Maybe It's Too Soon To Require Autonomous Mode
Elon Musk recently posted a video interview with Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of NVIDIA (which makes the chips needed for artificial intelligence computing).
In the interview, Mr. Huang insists that "every single car someday will need to have autonomous capability. It's safer..."
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 25, 2025
Science fiction fans have longed for this future for many years. In his 1976 novel Imperial Earth, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke wrote about autonomous cars and the requirements of the law:
As the beautiful old car cruised in almost perfect silence under the guidance of its automatic controls, Duncan tried to see something of the terrain through which she was passing. The spaceport was 50 km from the city - no one had yet invented a noiseless rocket - and the four-lane highway bore a surprising amount of traffic. Duncan could count at least 20 vehicles of different types and even though they were all moving in the same direction, the spectacle was somewhat alarming."I hope all those other cars are on automatic," he said anxiously.
Washington looked a little shocked. "Of course," he said. "It's been a criminal offense for at least a hundred years to drive manually on a public highway. But we still have occasional psychopaths to kill themselves and other people..."
(Read more about Arthur C. Clarke's autonomous cars)
Given the difficulty in achieving full self driving (FSD) in Tesla cars, which Mr. Musk has been predicting every year since I bought my Tesla Model S, it might be premature to actually start requiring it. Even "someday".
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 6/3/2025)
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